Stockton potholed by gaps of empathy

Daniel Goleman, a best-selling psychology author (and Stockton native) wrote a piece for The New York Times the other day called "Rich People Just Care Less."

Michael Fitzgerald

Daniel Goleman, a best-selling psychology author (and Stockton native) wrote a piece for The New York Times the other day called "Rich People Just Care Less."

"A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power," Goleman wrote.

This piece has "Stockton" written all over it. Other American cities, too, of course. But especially cities with a big spread of economic and social classes.

Contributing his essay to "The Great Divide," a Times series on inequality, Goleman cited experiments showing the rich tend to tune out the poor.

"This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session," Goleman wrote, "where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing."

In these get-to-know-ya meetings, rich people's faces betray "disregard." They dominate the conversation. Or look right through the other speaker, Goleman wrote.

He cited another example. Researchers in Amsterdam and Berkeley, pairing rich and poor subjects, had them share their tales of woe: deaths of loved ones, divorces, etc.

"The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful," Goleman wrote.

Why? Research is showing that "we focus the most on those we value most," and we value those we need.

"While the wealthy can hire help, those with few material assets are more likely to value their social assets: like the neighbor who will keep an eye on your child from the time she gets home from school until the time you get home from work."

The financial differences change peoples' behaviors, Goleman wrote. "Poor people are better attuned to interpersonal relations - with those of the same strata and the more powerful - than the rich are, because they have to be."

We all do this, he adds. Even as the rich pay less attention to us, we pay less attention to those "below" us.

This distancing, Goleman wrote, "makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others ... "

These psychological traits have a political dimension. "In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them," Goleman wrote.

He cited House Republicans' vote to slash food stamps and their assault on health care - fueled in part by an "empathy gap" between tea party congressmen and poor Americans, often Americans of color.

I suspect there's an obverse syndrome, one in which the less fortunate come to think the worst of the better off. Watching the citizen comment period at council meetings tends to confirm it.

In fact, the empathy gap appears to be common in Stockton. Not because so many here are rich but because the region's dire poverty creates the same sort of power gap.

Historically, an example is school segregation. Looking back, you wonder how the citizenry could consign a large part of the city's young to splintering, dysfunctional schools (until a historic 1975 court order).

According to Goleman, the poverty caused more fortunate Stocktonians to tune out.

Segregation, a physical as well as social distance, also leads to exaggerating the violence of disadvantaged neighborhoods. And to shunning them.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the dysfunction in Stockton Unified continues.

A more recent example involves Mayor Anthony Silva's election. His victory is seen partly as an uprising of a less-advantaged class of voters who felt ignored.

Biases are dispelled by "letting people from hostile groups get to know one another as individuals and even friends." Then people start caring more.

Many Stocktonians are ahead of the curve in crossing cultural and economic divides and embracing diversity. When they write the manual on that, it will have a chapter on us.

But perhaps this city's ills persist in part because its starkly different economic levels create an empathy gap that blinkers the more fortunate to the needs of the rest. Perpetuating problems that haunt us all.